<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Welcome by May</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24410353">Welcome</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May'>May</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Drabble Collection, Gen, Ghost-type Pokemon, Ghosts, Horror</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 07:06:53</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>971</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24410353</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten hungry little ghosts.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Welcome</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>A drabble collection focusing on various ghost-type Pokemon.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>1.</p>
<p>Lightning splits the sky, rain sticks your clothes to your skin. There’s a quiet house, warm and golden through the swaying trees. When you swing open the door, gentle light invites you in. There are seven candles lining the windowsill, and a soft rug on the wooden floor.</p>
<p>Slow-limbed and with heavy eyelids, you drop down onto the rug and curl up. It calms your tired mind, cradles your aching body. Rain patters, the sky rumbles, a murkrow caws. The candle flames lick the air, their blue hearts blazing. They flicker, fat and bright, as you drift away.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>2.</p>
<p>Beneath the grass, the ruined tower and the susurrations of ghosts, there’s a red light. A shadow feeds on it, growing large and rolling out its tongue like a garden path. The walls of its mouth glisten, its throat a dark corridor.</p>
<p>With three other trainers, you stand in formation, planning to catch it. But you hear a sweet, distant voice, like a sepia-toned dream. You feel your friends’ eyes on your back as you walk towards it, as you follow the sound. Inside the shadow’s mouth, you look for old memories beneath forgotten skies.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>3.</p>
<p>The snow catches the cold sunlight, and you squint. You try and flex your numb fingers and toes in their woollen shrouding. Across the snow, there’s a rustle like silk on rough stone, and a whisper.</p>
<p>The hand that takes yours is just warm enough that you don’t feel like letting go. She turns towards you with clear blue eyes and offers you hot soup and a fireside. Afterwards, your skin and your guts warmed, you’re satisfied and tired. She’s watching you as you fall asleep, as the fire dwindles into nothing.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>4.</p>
<p>Your new sword matches your brilliant shining armour. It’s as sharp and deadly as you are. Once the clink of metal has quieted, the last withdrawal of a blade from torn flesh, it whispers to you. Tales told like secrets, its ornate sash wrapped around your arm like a conspirator. When you are tired, it sings.</p>
<p>A lost battle, a dead silence and it tells you everything. An old knight can move on if there’s somebody to take his place. It’s your turn, now, to find a novice you can teach everything you know.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>5.</p>
<p>It’s a sunny day, with just enough of a breeze to coast across your skin and make the grass blades shiver. Before you, Nincada readies her claws and slashes enough to to weaken. It happens after five catches.</p>
<p>Ninjask flits and buzzes proudly around you. But, there’s something taking a space you hadn’t yet chosen to fill. You let it out. It hovers; surrounded by the constantly moving, breathing, living nature, it is a still point. Where it hangs, it slowly rotates like a smooth machine. Inside it is hollow. Inside it is nothing.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>6.</p>
<p>If you wait in this place, you can see the dance. They flit down, full with nectar, and imitate the swinging, furious motion of fire, or the sparkling bounce of electricity, or even the gentle sway of a calm mind.</p>
<p>Tonight, the dance is precise and has a resonant grace. It makes the air still with its disquieting elegance. You feel your heart beat to their movements, your blood turning cold. It’s enough to make souls quail inside the living and even enough to make them move back into the dead. With a feathered motion, reality breaks open.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>7.</p>
<p>The doll you were clutching in that old photograph must be in an attic, now, or under a bed you no longer sleep in. You hugged it, tightly, your arms pressing into its soft fabric. There was always a wistfulness to that picture, but you never think about it after you’ve put it down.</p>
<p>One night, something shifts at the edge of your dream. You wake to a weight on your chest and a metal grin, wider than it used to be. The zipper has more teeth than you remember. After all these years, it has found you.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>8.</p>
<p>As the ship courses forward, the rhythm of the ocean lulls you to sleep in your warm cabin. The peaceful stretch of the water just feet away from your head is calming.</p>
<p>A jolt wakes you, but then all you can hear is the rising and breaking of the sea against the side of the ship. You leave your room, and it’s still quiet but for a soft giggle coming from the dining room. Opening the door, you see gelatinous flesh. Several blank, sunless eyes turn towards you, and you notice the red, running like heavy, briny seawater.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>9.</p>
<p>You find it on the bright shores of Alola. It’s different from the ones you’ve seen, with a gunpowder zeal instead of the steady resolution of the earth. It bows its ivory head over mounds of dirt by the side of the road.</p>
<p>When you catch it, it tilts that osseous head, unearthly fires behind the eye-sockets. You dream of black-uniformed killers in a quiet, sombre town. After you wake, you ask it what it wants, and it raises its flaming bone club. You understand, and know that you must help it, just to be better.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>10.</p>
<p>There’s an ancient cemetery beneath Sinnoh, on the edge of a silent lake. Inside, the walls smell like old earth and bones and things too ancient to be remembered.</p>
<p>In its heart, there stands something that is not quite a god before an elegy written in letters that make your mind strain. The ungod is made up of so many things, in its six legs, its hooves and its ragged wings. It seems like it was made before there was a pattern that life could follow. Like something unknowable. It opens its mouth, turning the world inside out.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>